Restating the obvious

Claiming ownership of the obvious as core policy is a fine political traditional going down through the ages, but why does the fact that children brought up in a stable 2-parent family generally create less havoc and lead more successful lives than children of broken/single parent homes, need to be quite so regularly "rediscovered"..?

Ian Duncan Smith's latest contribution to the reinvention of Tory policy has made the latest of these rediscoveries, but stops short on the precarious and mine-strewn path of analysis - so permit TMP to take a stab. What's a foot or two amongst friends? We'll just get some of those nifty springs fitted instead, and then no one will be able to catch us again. But if we can identify some reasons for the astonishing denial of the obvious over the past couple of decades, we might get nearer a long term solution.

[In the style of a Tom Baker narration:]

So much of chattering-class media and education has been progressively controlled by confirmed bachelors and strident spinsters for the past 20 years since homosexuality became compulsory in Little Britain, that the subversive assertion that two parent families are an irrelevant bourgeois anachronism has almost been accepted as a given. It isn't; it never was and, crucially, never will be: so would the pink mafia kindly please get over it, and move on.

The fact that many "single" people are disproportionately successful with respect to limited talent owes a fair bit to the fundamentally selfish nature of their persuasion, leading to the reality that helping to bring up kids in stable family relationships can be a huge and expensive distraction for those who choose to be boringly conventional in their view of society. Some (many?) employers also practise a form of subtle discrimination since they are aware that "married with children" workers inevitably have priorities outside the company.

If being determinedly single means riding around in a pristine Porsche Boxter instead of a Vauxhall Zafira littered with chocolate biscuit crumbs and home to an escaped hamster, then it's little wonder that metrosexuals like David Walliams keep their options so ambiguously open.

Once upon a time, the argument in favour of pretending that single parents and broken homes were not an impediment might have been attributed to a need to consider the feelings of kids of broken homes so they they are not immediately provided an excuse for underachievement. However, the facts are inescapable, and denial has done no party to this fundamental social deceit, any discernible favours. Now is the time to enlist kids to put pressure on their parents to act responsibly once again.

The modern tendency to have kids late is also a mistake. Apart from the physiological issues, by the age of 30 most parents, after a pampered upbringing by their own guilt-ridden parents and 10 years of dinky time (dual-income, no kids yet) , have grown comfortable on assorted selfish indulgences, and simply do not understand the sacrifices that traditional parenthood entails.

Maybe the most selfish indulgence of all is looking forward to having grown up kids off your hands in your early fifties. Spend that inheritance while you still can; and not on stair lifts.

So perhaps the theft of pension funds was actually a subtle way of reminding the population that since Gordon and his nanny state has blown the savings on surveillance cameras, ex-PM's perks, immigrant housing and diversity assertion training, he and it won't be around to look after you in your old age, and a caring family might be your only option. It's too bad that Gordon's kids will be nagging for university top-up funding just as he's hitting 65...